THE BURNING FOUNTAIN: A Study in the Language of Symbolism

by Philip Wheelwright ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Despite its engaging title, this book is largely for semanticists and explicators, though, on second thought, anthropologists might enjoy some astonished moments. If this book means anything (and not everything), it is an attempt to show how poets achieve their most stunning effects. How metaphor, juxtaposition, and use of words which have depth meaning, give power to poetry. To this end, Mr. Wheelwright has read and quotes most of the philosophers, the leading semanticists, and looked into the literature of the Far East, the Near East, the Norsemen, Shakespeare, the Greek writers of tragedy (but curiously, not Homer), and speaks skimmingly of Goethe, the Celtic legends, and Navajo and South American Indian culture, not to leave unmentioned the primitive customs of the Pacific Islanders and the cave pictures in southern France. All this leads him to a final chapter devoted to T.S. Eliot and the Bible, by which time he has concluded that the right road for man is upward and onward..... It is difficult to say just to whom one can recommend this book -- if so disorganized a piece of writing can be called a book. But there is a great deal of valuable material which will certainly interest critics of the most modern school of ""explication"".

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1954

Categories: NONFICTION